News & Advice

Loving the World to Death: The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Overtourism

Parts of the world we love are straining under too much travel. Some aren’t handling it well. But among others, there are signs of hope.
VENICE Crowd gathered on Palazzo Ducale during Carnevale di Venezia.
Getty

The world is too much with us.

Seriously. We’re killing it. Loving it to death—parts of it, anyway. Spin the globe and drop a finger; you’re probably pointing at someplace that’s coping with too much of a good thing: tourists, which everybody wants, turning up in numbers so great they’re obscuring the very thing they’ve come to see. Santorini. Thailand. Italy’s Cinque Terre. Barcelona. Dubrovnik. Everyone wants to travel like a local. But what happens when the locals can’t get a seat for all the out-of-towners crowding their neighborhood joint?

“Overtourism” may be one of those buzzwords that’s been stretched past sense to cringe-worthiness, as likely to mean “the bus was crowded” as “they’re telling tourists to GTFO.” But author and journalist Elizabeth Becker remembers a time when it was scarce. She was researching her book on the subject, trying to plug into the existing conversation—only to find there wasn’t one. “People didn’t understand what I was looking at,” she says.

That was five years ago. Now, you can’t escape it. Headlines; industry conference agendas; political manifestos. Cities, islands, whole countries are catching up on the concept, fast, driven by the struggle to manage an ever-expanding influx of travelers.

Like most things, the subject is more complicated than the headlines let on. Politics, commerce, and global capitalism weave a sticky web. “Overtourism is an effect of success,” says Albert Arias Sans, Head of the Barcelona City Council’s Strategic Plan for Tourism. “But this success is always somehow planned or facilitated by other things that are not related to tourism.”

Oh So Social

‘Other things.’ Like the sharing economy—Airbnb in particular, whose explosive growth over the last decade has radically altered room inventories worldwide, barely speed-bumped by attempts at regulation. Like transatlantic airfare wars between a growing roster of carriers, with routes proliferating, costs dropping, and booking easier than ever. Like airports in new locations, and airport expansions in big markets. Like bigger, better, and more varied cruise ships, bringing passengers to a broadening range of ports, many of which couldn’t be reached before—and often taking them out again before they can spend the night. Like the surge in travel by the Chinese, whose overseas visits have nearly tripled in the last decade, to 150 million. Don’t think math can be dramatic? Only around 8 percent of China’s population has a passport. But that 8 percent equates to more than 100 million travelers. And some estimates have that number doubling by 2020.

But is overtourism really a new problem, or have the digitization of media and the saturation of social networks just made it easier to see? Both, says Becker—but with one key twist.

“People are finally understanding that the sentiments of the people who are being visited are paramount,” she says. “Previously, all the articles, all the material, everything was about the consumer—where the traveler should go, how to entice them, what the traveler should do, where they should stay, have fun, and explore. Now the people in the destinations are coming to the forefront, and that’s critical.”

The Venice Problem

Everyone’s familiar with the threat posed by Venice’s rising water levels. But the city’s 30 million yearly visitors may be an even bigger problem. Some experts think the native population could drop to zero—that’s right, zero, as in nobody from Venice will actually live in Venice—by 2030. What’s driving them out? Inflated rents. A coastline damaged by the constant flow of cruise ships. And the tourists themselves, whose behaviors—some, like littering, clearly indefensible but others, like sitting, pretty benign—have provoked enough local outrage to make politicians act. (As our correspondent Mark Ellwood notes, they may have been too successful.)

Some 6,500 miles away, the tiny Philippine island of Boracay faces similar problems. Annual visits jumped from 260,000 in 2000 to 650,000 in 2009, driven in part by the Shangri-La Boracay Resort & Spa, the island’s first luxury resort. (It quickly became one of our readers’ favorite resorts in Asia.) Last year, the number of visitors topped 2 million. For every screensaver-perfect stretch of beach you’d find one strewn with discarded plastics and food wrappers. City streets were cluttered with garbage. The disarray got bad enough by last February that President Rodrigo Duterte publicly labeled Boracay a “cesspool”, and demanded it close for a six-month rehabilitation. Can that work? We’ll know soon enough. The island reopened on October 26.

Planning Your Way Out

Meanwhile, the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago 890 miles from Lisbon in the mid-Atlantic that’s blessed with Caribbean-blue lakes, waterfalls running into other waterfalls, mineral-rich hot springs, and a surrounding ocean that’s home to 27 species of whales, porpoises, and dolphins, got the memo. When the number of overnight American visitors jumped 28.8 percent between 2016 and 2017—credit, in part, a wildly successful homegrown public-relations campaign—the government was ready with caps on hotel rooms and a plan to get protected status as a sustainable destination. So far, it’s working: there are no plans to restrict visitors yet, and writer Sebastian Modak remains optimistic.

There’s no single solution to overtourism, just as there’s no single cause. But there are patterns. When visits to Machu Picchu rose from 400,000 in 1996 to 1.4 million in 2016, UNESCO grew alarmed: tremendous swells of foot traffic on a severe lack of infrastructure seemed to threaten disaster. They threatened to put the site on their “List of World Heritage in Danger.” But as Tyler Moss explains, the Peruvian government responded with Azores-style foresight: a five-year, $43.7 million plan to “reconceptualize” the site in a way that would manage visitors, conserve the ruins, and restore UNESCO’s confidence.

Management of visitors is also the secret to Bhutan’s “High Value Low Impact” approach, according to reporter Lester Ledsma. The Himalayan kingdom charges a “visa” fee of US$250 per day (US$200 in low season)—which sounds like a lot, until you consider that it covers meals, three-star (minimum) lodging, land transportation, and a guide. Then it looks like what you’d expect to pay in a major European city. Also, unless you’re from India, Bangladesh, or the Maldives, you’re required to pre-book your trip with a government-accredited travel agency, which lets Bhutan keep tabs on both quantity and quality. How’s that good for you, the traveler? Well, it means you won’t have to contend with crowds while you’re there, and it means Bhutan can fund the preservation and infrastructure that keep it worth visiting.

No matter what happens, Becker says, tourism isn’t slowing down. Keeping it sane, keeping it sustainable—that’s on us, as travelers and destinations. “It doesn't take miracles, it just takes a lot of hard work,” she says. —Condé Nast Traveler Editors

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